TechDirt: “Imagine you had pretty much unlimited power over the government and wanted to save taxpayers’ money. You could:
- Carefully study government operations to understand what works and what doesn’t
- Make targeted improvements based on data and evidence
- Track results to ensure changes actually deliver savings
Or you could do what Elon Musk did with DOGE: declare everything wasteful, start firing people at random, and claim you’re saving billions through pure destruction. It’s long been clear that Elon has never considered Chesterton’s Fence — the (generally somewhat conservative) principle that before dismantling long-standing systems, you should first understand why they exist. The results are exactly what you’d expect when someone treats government operations like an ExTwitter poll: lots of dramatic announcements, very little actual improvement, and some spectacularly costly fuckups. Rather than trying to understand the complex mechanisms of government operations, Musk’s DOGE crew has taken a slash-and-burn approach that’s clearly designed more for headlines and memes, than anything around actually improving the government. Let’s start with DOGE’s claimed “savings” — a masterclass in creative accounting that would make Enron blush (not to mention Hollywood accountants). We’ve already covered how they’re effectively making up their numbers, but the creative fiction writing continues. The DOGErs recently announced updated figures, claiming they’ve saved the government $115 billion. But pretty much anyone who understands any of this stuff says that’s a load of absolute bullshit…”
